Lupe Fiasco is set to drop his follow up to 2022’s Drill Music In Zion as he links up once again with longtime producer Soundtrakk for a full project.
Samurai has a release date of Friday, June 28 and features only eight tracks; a rarity in the age of music streaming. Today he released the lead single “Samurai” and its accompanying video. Soundtrakk’s production is refreshing as Lupe posts up in Chicago’s Ping Tom Memorial Park to give us some elite “battle raps.”
Lupe explained the album title in a press release, saying “The word ‘samurai’ means to serve. My relationship to that word has always meant that you need to be at the service of other people, either in the overall community, or in this instance, the rap community at large that I’ve been a part of for years.”
If you’ve followed Lupe, you’d know he practiced various forms of martial arts and sometimes posts video of himself practicing kata and sword techniques.
Lupe has also been teaching the course ‘Rap Studies’ at MIT in Cambridge, MA since 2022, and has also since been made a fellow at Yale, sharing his unique perspective on the industry at large. This album is also the first project since 2007’s The Cool that Lupe and his mentor/business partner Charles “Chill” Patton have worked on together. Chill was serving a prison sentence since 2007 and was finally released in 2023 after 16 years.
“It felt great to be back in the studio again as a family,” the rapper noted.
Check out the album artwork and tracklist below:
- “Samurai”
- “Mumble Rap”
- “Cake”
- “Palaces”
- “No. 1 Headband”
- “Bigfoot”
- “Outside”
- “Til Eternity”
